Commenting on the Panama Papers released on Sunday, MEP Julia Reda states:
The Pirate Party of Iceland will file a motion of mistrust against the Icelandic government in the Icelandic parliament today, because of the connections revealed by the Panama Papers between Prime Minister Gunnlaugsson as well as members of his cabinet and secret offshore companies.
The impact of the leak shows the importance of encouraging and protecting whistleblowers worldwide as well as on the European level. On the contrary, plans are now underway to instead increase the ability of corporations to keep secrets.
The Trade Secrets Directive to be passed by the European Parliament next week provides only inadequate protection for whistleblowers and investigative journalists, because it drastically extends trade secrets protection to any kind of secret information and puts the burden of proof on whistleblowers and investigative journalists that they were revealing trade secrets in the public interest. Instead, we need a European directive to protect whistleblowers. The Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament will present a draft of such a directive on 4 May 2016, the last day of Antoine Deltour’s Luxleaks trial.
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